A Long Post About Art, Music and Philosophy, and Why We Shouldn’t Just All Stick Our Heads in the Oven.
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There are numerous footnotes in this post – there are two ways to read them. You can either hover your mouse over the Roman Numeral and they will appear in a floating window, or you can click on it and you will be jumped to the footnote where you can click on a ‘return’ icon to get you back to where you were. Try it now.(i) There you go. Happy reading! Oh, and much more discussion and clarification in the comments.

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None of my Australian readers can have failed to have missed the recent musical debacle featuring two of the country’s most iconic institutions: Men At Work and Larrikin Music.(ii)

For the foreigners, this is the lowdown: Larrikin Music has successfully sued Sony BMG and EMI for plagiarism, claiming that songwriters Colin Hay and Ron Strykert used a phrase from another song as part of the Men At Work mega-hit ‘Down Under’. Here, listen to it now so you can follow me:

OK. So not the most cerebral music clip ever made, nor the most illuminating lyrics ever penned,(iii) but most of the world agrees that the song has a catchy enthusiasm as a satirical paean to Australiana – enough to make it a considerable success both in locally and abroad. And it continues to earn substantial amounts of money.(iv)

The issue is the flute riff that is played near the intro and again by the chap sitting in the tree at about the 53 second mark. It includes a note sequence from a very well-known Australian kid’s song called ‘Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree’ written by a woman named Marion Sinclair in the 1930s (the rights of the song are held by Larrikin – Ms Sinclair is now dead). I’m using my words here carefully – I say ‘note sequence’ because, unlike the judge who ruled the case, I’m not at all sure that the small snippet is recognizeable to many, perhaps most, people as as a tune in its own right, hanging as it does on the end of another few notes and making a whole phrase that sounds (to my ears) considerably different to the phrase as played in ‘Kookaburra’. Indeed, in the court case, this is what the musicologist called by Men At Work‘s defence argued also. Now, I’ve heard ‘Down Under’ innumerable times in the almost 30 years since its release, and although I know ‘Kookaburra’ as well as any Australian schoolkid, I never once recognized it in the Men At Work song. More pertinent, perhaps, is that no-one else seems to have recognized it either, including Marion Sinclair herself.(v) The reason for this is a simple one of musical context: ‘Kookaburra’ is written and performed in strict time in a major key(vi) and the ‘Down Under’ has a lollopping reggae beat and is in a minor key.

Oh, of course I can hear it now – because it’s been the subject of scrutiny – and I accept as any reasonable person must, that it’s pretty likely that Greg Ham, the band member who improvised the part on the recording, was ‘quoting’ the ‘Kookaburra’ melody in his performance. Even so my musical brain needs to do a quirky mental transposition to make it ‘feel’ like the tune I’m familiar with from the children’s ditty.

But truly, this is not the point. The crux of this whole matter is, as you obviously guessed, money. And, despite anything else you might hear or read, about nothing but money; Larrikin Music claims that the addition of this phrase to the song entitles them to between 40 and 60 percent of the song’s earnings. Since the judge ruled in their favour, we have to assume that he doesn’t find that notion quite as ridiculous as everybody else does.(vii)

As I write (I swear) kookaburras are sitting in an old gum tree right near my studio, laughing maniacally. Here’s the rather wonderful Colin Hay(viii) performing Down Under in recent times (well before any of this madness was even hinted at). It’s a sombre and rather more poignant version of the song, but I don’t think anyone would dispute that it’s a fine piece of work on its own, and it certainly doesn’t depend on the ‘Kookaburra’ riff to make it any better. Definitely not 40 to 60 percent better that’s for sure.

All this brings me to the actual purpose of this post, so if you’re still with me, crack open the whisky and settle back. We’re not even half done.

Recently while I was spending my time over at Bearskin Rug, one of my favourite haunts, I read an article by the redoubtable Mr Kevin Cornell (proprietor of said haunt) called Why the Monkey Dances. Kevin was pondering the wisdom of monetizing such efforts as Bearskin Rug. Or, to be more accurate, he was wondering how the hell, or even if, he might be able to make some cash out of a pursuit which is undeniably of quite some worth, and on which he expends a large amount of time and effort. After all, isn’t it worth something? And, since it is indisputably better than most of the crap on the net, isn’t it worth a decent something?

That post catalyzed a lot of my ongoing thoughts on this topic and it lead me to think seriously about discarding many of my preconceptions about how we artists (especially musical artists because that’s my field) work, and our value in this modern world.

So now I am going to propose some ideas that are likely to be heretical to mostly every composer or songwriter who reads this.

The ‘Down Under’ affair is an example of what I see as just another pneumatic staple in the cheap pine coffin of the modern music industry. The reason that record companies, publishers, distributors and their smug legal divisions even exist – the music – seems to have completely lost its value. “Ho hum,” I hear you say, “I’ve heard that a million times from would-be rock stars and struggling songwriters. When does it get heretical?”

It gets heretical now, when I ask you to consider the value of the music in the first place. This is an expanded version of how I put it to Kevin:

Once upon a time there were no CDs or vinyl records or pianos. If you wanted to hear a song, you had to go find someone who was good at making music and pay them something and sit and listen(ix) – you weren’t paying for the ‘song’ per se, because it wasn’t actually something you could ever possess. You were paying for an experience. And then you went home. If you wanted to take the experience with you, then you had to learn the song, or the tune, and perhaps even learn an instrument to play it – the song itself didn’t cost you anything. At this time, there was no other way of having music. Today we call this ‘folk music’ and now, just as it was when it was written, no-one owns it.

After many millennia of this kind of thing, a way of printing notated music came along and you could more easily and directly bring the music into your home, admittedly with some effort (you had to learn how to read the sheet music). Also, suddenly, the song itself accrued a value – you were required to pay for the sheet music. Some of what you paid found its way, in theory, back to the person who came up with the ‘original’ song. This notion of monetary reward for ‘originality’ had not existed in any formal way prior to this time – until now music had been one great swooshing sea of influence and re-influence, as any folk musicologist will tell you.

The next big event to affect the course of music was the ability to record and ‘keep’ it; the wax cylinder came along, followed by the vinyl record. All you needed now to bring the music into your home was some more money to spend (but relatively little effort on your own part). Now you were paying for the song, a mechanical device on which to play it and also for the rights to play it on that device. But because these things were still fairly rare, the experience was special, and it felt appropriate to fork out some dollars. Note well that the margin of profit on early recordings was very small – you paid mostly for the cost of the technology, and a little to the artist, a little to the publisher of the music and perhaps a small amount to the manufacturer and distributor of the recording itself. This makes sense.

Also understand that because it now had a money value, the music acquired a legal value, and the listener acquired some legal obligations (no-one ever asked whether anyone wanted this – it just became so). At the same time opportunistic intermediaries discovered that, due to the desirability of this ‘music’ stuff, they could insert themselves into the process (which had now become quite complicated) and make a tidy sum wrangling this ephemeral blend of musical art and fashion on which everyone had become so keen. Music was becoming a business. A whole superstructure of people who had nothing to do with the creation of the music itself, needed to earn money from it. The Recording Industry was born.(x)

Pretty rapidly, the vinyl records became less rare and very popular, and then cassettes and CDs came along, and you could have music everywhere you went – even driving along in your car! It was amazing, and people happily paid for this wonderful experience. Behind the scenes, though, a very important set of changing circumstances wasn’t being revealed to you: the cost of manufacturing the recordings was diminishing at roughly the same rate as the profits of the companies who now owned them was increasing. CDs started to cost only a few cents to manufacture, but were being sold for twenty dollars or more! Most of the money you were paying to hear a recording of your favourite band was not for the CD object itself, nor indeed for the music on it, but to support a lumbering Frankenstein’s monster stitched out of studio executives and A&R people, distributors and advertisers, lawyers and lackeys. The advent of CDs also brought with it another unparalleled phenomenon: with this new digital technology, the corporations discovered that audiences were prepared to re-purchase, for a premium, music that they already possessed. This was music that was already ‘owned’ by the record companies and for which the legwork and marketing had been done years ago. It was a goldmine. Music that had mostly already paid for itself was being sold again. Instead of recognizing this as the bonus it was, the recording industry began to see this enormous incoming flood of money as the status quo.

All this while, the experience of listening to music was slowly becoming less special. The amount of music available to any individual was staggering. Music was now everywhere – in your lounge room, in your bedroom, in airports, in elevators, in buses, on planes. It played in the background of films and tv shows, and had so many ancillary uses that you didn’t even listen to it. I bet that you have music playing right now, as you read this, and you haven’t even been aware of it. Music had became so portable you could even take it with you while you were jogging. Most people in, in fact, didn’t know what a world without music was like.

Then a new revolution began: the computer came along, and with it the invention of the mp3 and the iPod and the capacity to store more songs than anyone could listen to in several years… The music was now ubiquitous and completely unencumbered. It had transcended physical form, and existed only as bits of data – intangible, tiny, transportable and eminently copiable. And, horrifyingly for the recording business, utterly uncontrollable.

And suddenly, because the specialness of the music and the mechanical difficulty of rendering it were almost non-existent, the pecuniary value of the songs per se was revealed to be way higher than listeners actually thought they were worth when it really came down to it. And these insubstantial creations were now encumbered by a host of legal obligations that we had never agreed to in any real sense, and to which we had never really expected to adhere.(xi) In quite surreal extremes, people now found themselves being sued for millions of dollars over the possession of a few tiny pieces of music! Others were forced into bankruptcy because they made it possible for audiences to swap and listen to the music for nothing – in a profound sense doing nothing technically wrong themselves. It seemed, to rational people, a system out of kilter. To the recording industry, it was the death of the goose that laid the golden eggs.

Now here’s the heresy.

I propose that the problem we are now contemplating is that the music itself is worth, in monetary terms, exactly what it was always worth – nothing. Or, to be more exact, it is worth as much as anybody in particular is willing to pay for it. I submit that we have contrived to give music a value of zillions of dollars in an arbitrary fashion and we are now reaping the costs of our greed; complicated legal problems, a dearth of spontaneity, constipated creation and yet another (as if we need it) huge cartel of lawyers and go-betweens. And MOST of the money that is feeding this bloated lumbering beast does not go to music creators. The music itself is, and has always been, both valueless and beyond value. It can’t, and shouldn’t be, labelled with a price tag.

Let me rotate it through another angle for you, so that the shock might be eased a little. Consider this: if you are a stickler for being ‘legal’ about your music and still want it without paying any money for it, it is entirely possible for you to do so. You can play Greensleeves and Blow the Man Down, Chopin and Schubert, Brahms and Bach, Beethoven and Debussy, on your piano or violin, on your synthesizer or your theremin, on your harmonica or steel guitar for absolutely nothing. We are talking about some of the most awe-inspiring music ever written and it is entirely free. And here’s the thing: you can quite legally record that music, and sell the recording to your friends. You can perform it in front of thousands and charge them $90 apiece for the privilege of hearing you play it. You can score a film with it, use it as a tv theme and play it as music-on-hold on your phone system, without incurring any cost to yourself or anyone else. Does any of that seem like a bad thing? Not at all, in my opinion. And yet you cannot do any of that with the latest song from Lady Gaga!(xii) How absurd is that? In a fundamental way, we’ve decided that the music of Lady Gaga is more valuable than the music of Beethoven. We have taken music and made it into an expensive and gaudy fashion item. It is, I say, time that we restored it to its true value.

I also ask you to think about this fact: we don’t need to have music in our lives to survive.(xiii) It cannot be equated with food, or shelter, medicine or running water, warmth or companionship. It is a privilege that, because of its sheer ubiquity, we have begun to take entirely for granted. My feeling is that these days it might even improve our lives to have a little less of it around.

The Men at Work ruling that I talked about above seems, to most people I’ve talked to, intrinsically flawed. I think that’s because we naturally feel that this idea that music can have a value that is determined in money and in ownership, is deeply and fundamentally wrong. Australians don’t like the notion that ‘Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree’belongs to anyone, because it is part of our national psyche. Just as we really don’t believe ‘Down Under’ belongs to anyone and will happily make an mp3 of it to send to our friend in Brussels, even though that is entirely ‘illegal’.(xiv)

Songwriters and composers who are reading will be champing at the bit by now, and I can feel the indignation and fury fairly fuming out of my screen. Surely it’s our right to make a living from the sweat of our labours? Well, yes and no. Not our right, by any means, any more than it is our right to make money out of motivational speaking, or balloon folding, or portraiture, or photography, or stand-up comedy. But, if we do something people find enjoyable, or moving, or profound, then certainly we should expect that they might pay us something to do it. But I don’t think the correct way to go about that is by imposing what must necessarily be an arbitrary value on the music itself.(xv)

I believe we need to revise the idea that if we pull some notes out of the air, and arrange them in some order, that they belong to us. I propose that the music itself, like information, should be free.(xvi) Aspiring songwriters are crying “But surely my new masterpiece is worth something???! Surely all the time and emotional outpouring I’ve put into this song is valuable in some way?” I say no it isn’t. It’s absolutely worthless until such times as someone decides to pay you money for it. And then it’s worth exactly what they’re willing to pay. Sure – go ahead and concoct a value for it if you like, but don’t complain when the audience doesn’t see it like you do. Where is their obligation to do that?

What’s more, I predict that we are now in an age where the outcome of all I’ve suggested above will be determined to be so no matter what we decide to do!

To step sideways into another realm of other intellectual property for a moment, that of online journalism, we see corporate media giants struggling to understand the profound change that confronts them. Rupert Murdoch has said that he wants to charge people to view his online newspapers. I predict he will fail if he tries to do that. Murdoch is “striving to fix a ­”malfunctioning” business model” and says that “The current days of the internet will soon be over.”(xvii) Murdoch can’t understand why he’s lost almost half a billion dollars on MySpace when the rest of us can see it as plain as day – the value that he and his old-world cronies are putting on these enormous social clubs is completely arbitrary. It’s as fickle as any fashion. The MySpace party got uncool and everybody left. Now they’re dancing over at FaceBook, but that will, in time, go out of fashion too. These big corporate heavy-hitters just can’t bear the thought that there are tens of millions of people out there doing stuff, and they can’t be relied on to generate any money!

So their solution is completely laughable – throttle the pipe! Dominate the net! Dam the stream! Stop the fun!

Such a solution will fail.

And now the rhetoric is becoming unsettling. Even people who should know better are clinging to a model that is fairly cracking under the weight of its own inability to cope. A few days ago on The Guardian I watched a video of Jaron Lanier telling us that Web 2.0 was a dismal failure.(xviii) Well, of course it is you nitwit. Web 2.0 is a stupid and meaningless conceptual term dreamed up by people who think they can predict the future and make money from it.(xix) In the interview Lanier looks like a deer in the headlights when he says:

Some friends and I had this thought that perhaps that the internet would be such a fountain of wealth and opportunity that it could be entirely open, that people could give away the fruits of their brains and hearts and the opportunities they would get in return would be huge.

He goes on to be amazed and appalled that a great number of people who inhabit the open prairies of the net can’t communicate sensibly, are argumentative and petty, prone to theft, operate in packs, and are conservative. He bemoans what he sees as the demise of ‘culture’ and starts to sound unpleasantly just like Rupert Murdoch when he says that people need to be corralled in their internet habits for their own good.(xx) He says categorically that nothing good has come from the open source movement, which is one of the most daft things I’ve heard anyone say about the net in a long time.(xxi)

His main criticism seems to be that the web has turned into one big mediocre mush – again, I think it’s peculiar that he finds this at all surprising. It is just mirroring how people really are. Jaron Lanier has plainly never been to a town council meeting. He seems to have, for a while at least, entertained the naive idea that enabling everyone to have a voice would somehow change the fundamental structure of the human condition. How quaint! He sees the web turning into a big, noisy, chaotic, sprawling, stinking, confusing, confronting bazaar when he wanted something more akin to a nice polite knitting circle. Ha!

OK. Given all that stuff, where do we go from here? Why shouldn’t we, as I’ve suggested in my sub-heading, all just stick our heads in the oven and be done with it? Well, first of all let me say that I’m not going to suggest ‘solutions’. A need for a solution infers that there is a problem in the first place, and I think the main problem we’re seeing here is that a whole lot of people are unhappy that they used to make money under a system with which they were comfortable, and now they’re not. To take on that complaint is then a lot like sympathising with people who used to make their living out of harpooning whales, or shoeing horses, or sweeping chimneys. Things change, and it’s tough. And also, as I’ve said above, it’s not a God-given right that we should be compensated for something that has no pressing utility, and we need to accept that as a baseline.(xxii)

However, despite everything I’ve written above, and despite how gloomy this might all appear, I’m very optimistic about the future of creativity; about the future of music; about the future of news dissemination and journalism; about the future of fine art, digital art, writing, poetry, movies and comedy. My optimism stems from one single fact: human beings, by their nature, are prolifically creative. This is not to say that everybody is as creative as everybody else, nor indeed that we will care for much of what gets created. But I contend that a deep desire to ‘make stuff’ runs through us, and will continue to do so no matter what.

Whether we like it or not, people will create stuff for nothing, and some of that stuff will actually be good. Despite what Lanier and Murdoch and others might believe, we don’t need their guidance to amuse and entertain ourselves. And, I suggest, we don’t need to be taught ‘culture’, nor to be taught the value of it.

Jaron Lanier made one tiny glimmer of sense in his Guardian article: he mentioned the idea of micropayments. I think this might just provide an angle on how creative people can get some small kind of monetary reward for their efforts (I say small, but in fact I don’t see any a priori reason why this would necessarily be so. It’s probably helpful for most artists to think of it like that, though). Once you abandon the idea that your music, or your art or your journalism has any inherent value, this starts to look pretty interesting.

Let’s say you visit a website – maybe The Guardian, since we’ve bandied them around a bit – and you read an article by Jaron Lanier. If you thought that article was valuable – that it informed your day, or amused you, or enlightened you – would you chip in a cent or two if you knew that money was going to the person who wrote it? I would certainly do that. If you went to a music site and you heard something that lifted your spirits, or made your heart flip, would you chip in a few cents for that experience? I would do that too. And (perhaps it’s me being naive now) I think a lot of people would do that. Technically, I don’t see there’s much of an impediment to doing this kind of thing anymore, and it will only be a short time before someone implements a viable scheme.(xxiv) It would be straightforward: you set up an account much like a bank account and deposit some money into it – maybe a baseline $100 or so. Then as you tour around the web, you’d see little icons that said, maybe, ‘1c’ or ‘5c’ attached to creative enterprises. You click that icon and the appropriate amount is donated to that person from your account. When your account is depleted to a certain minumum threshold, you’re informed by email that you need to top it up. The system can’t be anymore complicated than that or it won’t work.(xxv) Of course there is going to be the explosion of exploitation that comes with this idea – it’s entirely inevitable. You can’t stop human nature, and unlike Jaron Lanier, I’m not going to kid myself or anyone else that we won’t get huge troughs of pig swill – it exists in real life too, but on the internet, you get to know about it.

OK, it doesn’t take much in the way of brains to see that this is a tiny trickle of income – a few cents here, a few cents there, how is anyone going to make a living out of that? Well, my speculation is that not many will. To be more accurate, I think that a large number of people will make some pocket money, and a very small number of people, proportionately, will make a living. But here’s the thing – that’s really no different at all to the way things are now. If you are an artist of any kind you know exactly what I mean. Artists, musicians, journalists, writers – all spend the vast part of their lives scraping a living. It is only a very very small number who garner any great success out of their craft. And, if you do happen to get successful, you stand to make some reasonable money – not stupid insane money, which is what I suggest happened under the old model, but decent money.(xxvi) Let’s go back full circle and look at the Men at Work song I talked about at the beginning of all this. Now, I don’t have a clue what kind of sales that record made, but let’s say for the sake of argument it’s been played, here or there, legally or illegally, 10 million times (I don’t think that’s an unreasonable figure – probably on the low side, in fact). If that song had been awarded 5c for every play, that’s a tidy $500,000 for a song! And $500k that goes straight to the song’s makers, to boot.(xxvii) If you write ten successful songs in your career, you’re making a fair living – better than most. Plus, I’m going to suggest something else that is entirely new to the model – I propose that you don’t rely solely on your music to make you money. As well as being a songwriter, you now need to take on all the other attributes of a successful artist and be the total entrepreneur(xxviii) – sell the t-shirts, sell the lyrics, sell photos of the band, sell your outtakes and your improvisations and your blog posts all for a few cents! In short, think laterally and exploit novelty. Rely on the idea that people will throw you a coin even if they won’t buy you champagne.(xxix)

So to this end, I propose that we all stop calling ourselves ‘artists’ and start thinking of ourselves as pragmartists. Because you can be sure of two things:

•Trying to impose control on the system will fail spectacularly, detrimentally and miserably. It’s already starting.

•If you think what you do is of a value $X, there will always be someone who is creating something just as good or better for $0. Those people are your competition. And they won’t go away.

Phew. There you have it – the longest post in Cow history. Who’d have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him? How many of you stuck with me, I wonder?

I say iconic because of Larrikin’s awesome status in our music history, but that hides a multitude of omissions. Larrikin Records, formerly the brainchild of the inimitable Warren Fahey, is not the company it once was, having been split and sold many years back. The publishing arm and the label are now controlled by big companies. No surprise there. [↩]

I’m still not entirely sure what the song is supposed to be about, but over the years I’ve inferred that it’s a caricature of the way Australians present themselves overseas, and a burlesque of the Crocodile Dundee-like aura that the country seems to have acquired in the minds of foreigners [↩]

Of course. If it had disappeared into obscurity, I think we can agree that Larrikin would not have been remotely interested in correcting a ‘point of order’. [↩]

The similarity was pointed out on a popular tv music programme late last year, and Larrikin Music immediately started seeing dollar signs. In a rather disingenuous attempt at justifying his position, director of Larrikin Music Publishing, Norm Lurie (and some of members of the media, it has to be said), tried to evoke a miserable picture of the aged Marion Sinclair sitting penniless and alone in a nursing home while the Men At Work songwriters lived high on the hog. This is a fairly pathetic tactic. [↩]

The actual monetary award has yet to be decided. We shall see how that goes. [↩]

In the interests of full disclosure I will say that I have worked with Colin in the past and found him to be a masterful performer and excellent songwriter. He is also that most rare of beings – a scholarly and gentlemanly musician. [↩]

Or perhaps, someone else was paying them to perform for you, in which case it cost you nothing [↩]

I don’t want to imply that nothing good came out of this system – it obviously did. But in the last decade or so the landscape has become embarrassingly barren, and the record companies increasingly desperate to justify their existences. [↩]

How quickly we forget about the compilation tapes we used to make on cassettes, and swap with our friends. It was entirely inevitable that, once music was freed from technical bondage, it would be swapped and reinvented prolifically and carelessly. It’s the nature of music! [↩]

Aside, obviously, from playing it for your personal enjoyment in private. [↩]

Clearly, music, like art, is an important part of what it is to be human, so it fulfils an essential purpose in respect to our wellbeing, just as art and literature do. My point here is that if you take music away, you can still live a good life, if a much less profound one. [↩]

I hope you can see my point here – we may or may not decide to award the song some monetary worth according to any number of criteria, but we quite arbitrarily decide its value. I could give many examples of this: for example let’s say I own the song on a CD, but I feel it is OK to make a copy for my Dad, because he’d never buy it anyway. Or, I don’t own it, but I want to send it someone so they can hear the ‘Kookaburra’ riff that I’m talking about. Or, I own an audio-only version of it, but I think it’s OK to disseminate a couple of YouTube clips through my blog even though I don’t know where the legality of this stands. I submit that everyone reading this has done something of this nature. In other words, the value you have determined the song is worth has nothing at all to do with the record company’s, or the band’s, estimation of it. [↩]

How much is a song worth? Some years ago I was involved in a commercial where the advertising agency wanted to buy the rights to use 60 seconds of a Pet Shop Boys track for their ad. The Boys’ publisher wouldn’t sign away the rights for anything less than $400k Australian dollars. I hold two opposing thoughts in my mind regarding this: $400k is a fucking HUGE amount of money for a song. And yet, really, it’s the Pet Shop Boys’ total right to value it how they like, especially if it’s being used to give cachet to dog food or something. My point is that in some kind of bizarre Shrodinger’s Cat-like parody of quantum simultaneity, the song is at once worth precisely nothing (if they don’t sell it) and $400k (if they do). And really, they didn’t care either way. In the end, the advertisers wouldn’t fork out, so in this case it was worth nothing. The Pet Shop Boys probably didn’t even notice. This seems entirely wrong to me. [↩]

In both senses of the word: ‘free’ as in costing nothing, and ‘free’ as in unfettered to go where it will. [↩]

The business model is only malfunctioning according to his rules, ie, that he’s not raking in the billions he used to. He doesn’t understand that his time has passed – his infallible business sense has come up against an inexorable assault on the zeitgeist. [↩]

Lanier, in the article accompanying the interview clip, also says of the web in general: “Oh, I think the web has been a massive success. The web gave us the first empirical evidence that vast numbers of people really are creative, really do have things to offer, and really will do it – really will get their acts together.” He seems to be able to split the web experience into pieces in his head, somehow labelling things he doesn’t like as ‘Web 2.0′. He really is confusing for someone who is supposed to be some kind of digital guru. [↩]

The inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners Lee, quite rightly called the term ‘Web 2.0′ ‘a piece of jargon’, since his original concept of the web already embodied the ideas it hijacked. [↩]

I’m paraphrasing here, but that’s definitely the gist of the Guardian interview [↩]

Just in case it needs to be clarified, Lanier is saying that there is no ‘good’ in things like Wikipedia, Facebook, blogging, open source software such as Firefox or WordPress, contributive open concepts like YouTube, Flickr and Make, and what I would call ‘Capitalist’ open-market concepts like Etsy and Zazzle. And they are just a few of a host of marvellous working ideas. Now, this makes one really wonder about his meaning of the word ‘good’… [↩]

Believe me, this is difficult concept for an artist to swallow. It’s taken me an awful long time to get to this point, but now I’m here, everything seems a darn sight clearer. Once you cross this Rubicon, the view is spectacular! [↩]

I’m not claiming this as an original idea, by the way, but it is rather novel and strange if you’re accustomed to seeing your income from CD sales, or song royalties. [↩]

One such pending scheme is Flattr, which, although interesting, has a fatal flaw in my view. Perhaps I’ll go into that another time… [↩]

This is exactly the way that my electronic road toll account works, so this kind of system is nothing new. [↩]

I predict that the people who complain the longest and the loudest about my ideas will be those who were the most successful under the old paradigm. Those of us for whom that paradigm really didn’t work that well are likely to be more receptive to change. [↩]

Yes, yes, I can hear someone saying that Colin Hay and Ron Strykert probably made much more out of ‘Down Under’ than that, but they’re not listening – that model IS DEAD! FORGET IT! NOT HAPPENING ANY MORE! [↩]

You could, of course, pay someone else to do this – no reason not to, except that you dilute your earning capacity. The great thing you have going for you with the web is that your potential audience is vast and the legwork required to reach that audience is comparatively small. [↩]

Of course, none of this is really new to anyone who has been paying attention in recent years. It’s pretty much where a great number of people are headed in the music world, at least. Like I said before – I believe that these solutions will impose themselves upon us, no matter what we think or do. [↩]

27 Responses to “ The King is Dead! Long Live the King! ”

Good post- I’ve been thinking about many of the same issues regarding writing & publishing, and all the hand-wringing over how new technologies encourage “theft”, and how publishers & writers are doomed… and, as you point out, yes and no. The current publishing industry (books or music), as it is now set up, is probably doomed, and that is not necessarily a bad thing, nor does it in any way mean that creative people will not continue to create, nor that they will not be paid for their efforts. The entire issue really revolves around “ownership” and copyright law, and writers and musicians and composers certainly made a living, some a very good living, before there was copyright law, and before it was widely enforced. The people who really stand to lose here are the middlemen (publishers) who, in reality (and despite what they may tell you) have only one true reason for being: mass creation of physical product & its merchandising. Computers & the internet have given artists & creators the tools to do these two things themselves, and the publishers are not at all happy about it.

This brings to mind an article that was in the NY Times a few days ago about a successful second-tier band that has a major label contract but basically does most of their own promotion themselves. Their very first hit was a song they produced as a video and distributed on you-tube for free. It got tens of thousands of hits, went viral by being embedded on fans websites and blogs, and really got them started as a going concern. Then the music company stepped in and made a deal with You-Tube that resulted in the music company being paid a few hundreths of a cent whenever videos by artists repp’d by this company were played on you-tube, but also resulted in the video embed code being de-activated. Why? Because the video music was being “stolen” when it was embedded on a non-you-tube site. This band saw the “hits” on their video plunge from tens of thousands a month to hundreds a month. And who wins? the music company, of course. Once again they prove that it is in their power to make or break the band, not in the bands’ power. It is all futile, of course- you cannot stop technology. The battle is going to be pretty ugly while it lasts, but in the end the ones who will have to change dramatically are the big music & book publishers. The physical censorship of material, whether it be by the 16th century church or the 21st century BMI’s, has never worked.

Colonel: The concept of ‘ownership’ and intellectual property is a troubling one from the get-go. I believe you can clarify it somewhat if you examine the difference between creating something that can’t be copied, like a sixty foot metal sculpture, and creating something like a song or a piece of writing that can these days be easily and effortlessly be copied.

The sculptor is not concerned with any kind of IP in the work (setting aside photographic images for now) and is probably commissioned to build it as a one-off, for a particular client, for a particular purpose. She or he gets paid for the commission, and since copying the sculpture is next to impossible, there is no continual, repeating royalty that comes back to the sculptor. So that is an example of an artwork for which the concept of IP is really quite meaningless (I guess a sculptor could get all upset if another sculptor went to the trouble of imitating the work, but I don’t know of any such case). We can also find parallels in music: this is exactly how something like Handel’s Water Music would have been treated in the past – a monumental commissioned work that had no inherent value in itself. Handel still got paid.

But in recent history, as music and writing became more easily transportable, we concocted schemes to give them value that transcended the original creative effort. If you think carefull about this, it’s hard to justify. As I see it if you go down this path, then all creative efforts should be rewarded in this way. Why, for instance, does a film editor not get royalties on a movie? Editing is inarguably a creative process, but editors are only paid for the job they do, not for the IP they create. And there are many more examples I’m sure you could find. While we have these weird double standards, IP is a mess. You either give IP to everyone, or abolish it. I say abolish it – it’s the easiest and most sensible solution.

Let’s start with the rain. I idea of micropayments has been around for about a decade and started with the webcomic movement. Didn’t work. Newspaper sites are now trying this stupid suscribe and get a hard crap, also won’t work.

Why? For every site charging you to see their site, there is a better site not charging to see the same or better stuff. I have NO INTEREST in paying anything for any site content. My local newspaper just recently started a $30 a month subscription to their site with a free newspaper, but I can get all their news on another free site of another news paper. The only ways to make any money on the internet is having a VERY POPULAR site and advertising. See Facebook. They could charge, but everyone would leave for the next free thing. The other other way is to sell a product.

This is happening in all forms of art. I do webcomics, I make money selling adspace, I will never make enough to retire.

Marvel and DC make nothing on Comics anymore, so they came up with the bright idea of $3.95 a month, get every title digitally and seel everything in a year book for $50. Even that has only been lukewarm.

I can tell you what having a website has done for me. The past 7 years of having a website had earned me more money doing art than I ever would have done without it. I can sell art here and there, I get more work from mural, logos, and doing websites. I am going to make $15K this year from it. That is 5x more than I made without a site over 7 years. But again, is comes down to what some is willing to pay.

Something else to think about. I like your blog, I read it all the time, but if you for example went subscription fee to view, I wouldn’t come back. I find people ignore micropayments cause they are a pain in the ass to whip out the credit card to pay someone a dime.

As for Men at Work, LOVED the slowed down version, gonna steal that. Since the rulings a few years back on sampling judges have become idiots around music copyright. If I was Sinclair I would sue these guys next:

I agree, I did mean to make is sound like it was compulsary, I was just railing against newspaper who thing people will pay a subscription to view their site or parts of their site (I think this has also been proven to to work).

Yeah, it all comes down to what people will pay, and I sort of figured out the that people are mor that willing to pay me a discount price to do their website, than pay someone with much more coding skills that I do an arm and a leg to do their website.

I am even at a point now, people are willing to pay be $50 a month to maintain their Drupal, Joomla, or Wikibased sites.

The next 20 or so years are going to be really interesting. Because of the internet, I think you are going to see major changes in film, music, TV. There are already TV programs internet only, there are already bands like Public Enemy who are internet only, there are people making films basically to be seen on the internet.

Malach: The newspaper ‘subscription’ model that Rupert Murdoch wants to see is doomed to failure. He should know that by the fact that people don’t even want to sign up for unpaid subscriptions because it’s such a hassle. The NYT tried it for a while and lost readers in the thousands. Stupid. Pretty much all newspapers have come to the same conclusion. That he thinks that he can turn this around by charging money is daft beyond belief.

I wonder if he’s going to attempt to turn ALL his online publications to a pay model at the same time – thinking that this will convince people. Ha. It will be a DISASTER!

JR: I think that’s right – I constantly see stuff on the web that I would happily ‘reward’ with a few pennies, particularly if I thought that money was going directly to the person who created it. My feeling is that if we saw this kind of thing happening on a big enough scale it would become self-reinforcing.

And I’m sure people would find ways of exploiting such a system – they always do. There’s no way of stopping that kind of behaviour. Once you accept that notion, things start to look a little more doable. Part of the problem that the record industry and the movie industry have with ‘piracy’ is that they see every little bit of exploitation (every ‘pirated’ version) as a lost sale. It makes them go rabid. But they are seething over something that was never guaranteed in the first place – it’s like being sulky about all the Christmas presents you might have got if only people were nicer!

Perhaps your suggestion would also help in the debate surrounding the proposed Book Show Blog, and the expansion of the Overland Blog into states other than Victoria.

Neither organisation will be paying (at least not in dollars and cents) their contributors, which has created something of a furor, since what they’re asking for is essentially posts of a professional standard.

Apologies for linking to my own post to demonstrate this, I only do so because I’ve linked to other places, certainly not because I think my musings are particularly eloquent:

Heretical to some perhaps, but it jibes with what I’ve thought for the last couple of years. To put it in crude and dirty terms, the music industry we knew only existed because of a certain technology – a technology which is as obsolete now as lead plumbing. That game is over, the entire industry a shuffling corpse just too dumb too realize it’s time to lie down. These copyright cases are its death throes.

Whether the micropayment system will work I cannot guess, but there will always be demand for the creation of new music so people will find a way to pay for it somehow or other. A new market will evolve, and hopefully it will no longer be the sort of business were ten thousand struggle in obscurity for every ‘star’ who wins crazy over-fame.

As for this copyright case, I too have known the Kookaburra song since childhood and the Men at Work song since it was a hit, and I too have never noticed any similarity between them. The judge who decided that half the value or more of ‘Down Under’ derives from the other is mentally unfit.

(Though it strikes me… Surely what both passages of music have in common is that they are written in partial imitation of the cry of the Kookaburra. The bird should sue both parties!)

I love this idea. It would mean that the majority of artists – of all types – would have to get a day job, which is no bad thing. I wonder what Sting would have been like if he’d never had the cash to perch on his ivory tower? The talentless, ephemeral, one hit wonders won’t be assaulting my eyes, they’ll be too busy working at Tescos. I could only work as a graphic designer out of love, in my spare time making my output smaller but better. Artists will be grounded, massive money machines will be dead. It’s a win/win for all but the leeches and the talentless.

Excellent piece, which I agree with more or less wholeheartedly. Just one question and one point:

Question: what do you consider to be the ‘fatal flaw’ in the Flattr scheme?

Point: a very successful (near) micropayment system is already in place in the iPhone App Store. With amazingly powerful software available for less than a dollar and sometimes free, or free versions in reduced form and with payment made automatically via an already set-up account (iTunes Store) mightn’t this become the model for music, short films, writing and so forth?

Soph: These kinds of situations are going to become more and more common. The one thing you have to realise is that there is no imprimatur that says anyone has to pay anyone for anything! If the ABC & OLJ put out a call for bloggers to write for them for nothing, then the currency we’re considering isn’t money, but something else. If people are willing to deal in that currency – fame, glory, ego, whatever – then the model works and no-one can do anything about it!. We must all – and I say this as an artist of long standing, with much vested interested in my many works across many media – we must ALL understand the point that I raised several times in my post – our work is only worth what someone will pay for it. There is no point at all protesting that you are owed something for what you do.

Let me try and make this a little clearer. Every writer who puts pen to paper, every painter, songwriter and cartoonist – everyone who creates something – invests a personal value in their work. They all think what they do is worth something. And mostly they think that other people should recognize that value too. But this is not decreed by fiat. Quite plainly, not everybody who thinks they are an artist makes art that is good.

So, how do we decide what is good and what is not? My proposal says that we let other people decide by dispensing with the concept of inherent ‘value’ entirely. This does not preclude situations such as the one you’ve mentioned, where reputable ‘editors’ make compilations of work under a banner of some kind. If the micropayments ‘begging bowl’ idea that I mentioned was in effect, then this is actually a good thing for anyone selected to be included in such a scheme – you’re automatically placed on a roadway with more pedestrian traffic. If people like what you have to offer, then you’ll make some money.

But until such times as that kind of mechanism is in place, there is no way anyone could reasonably expect to get paid for blogging efforts. Simply put: if you dislike the ABC & OLJ scheme don’t participate. Here’s the problem (and everyone knows it, I suggest) – plenty of people will participate because it’s worth it for them! And some of those people will be good, too. That’s what scares everyone.

Nay: Thank you for your virtual 10c. Well, I anticipate this discussion will run for a while, so come back again and make some comments when you have time.

dorristheloris: I know of the SL tip jar concept. This works because you have a Linden Dollars account from which you can draw pennies. This is exactly what I’m suggesting for a RL situation.

Richard Chapman: I think more and more people are realizing that the old model is collapsing in on itself. Mostly, those people are just out & about making the new model with no-one telling them what to do. They will be the survivors when Mr Murdoch’s empire crumbles into the dust. Ozymandias, anyone?

Wayne: It is important to understand that there will still be talentless one-hit wonders under the model I suggest. Only, they will be literally one-hit wonders. They might make a few pennies out of their one hit, but they won’t be filling up landfill with the string of rubbish that they try and sell for years after. One thing that you should consider is that a ‘begging bowl’ scenario does tend to reward novelty, silliness, crassness, populism and so forth, for obvious reasons. But I suggest that while you might make a killing on one thing through these kinds of methods, it’s not something that you could make a career on (unless you’re very clever – in which case you’re an artist!)

Gdorrian: I’m not at all off-hand about the value of things. Did you not read my words about the works of Beethoven and Brahms and Bach? These are sublime creations that are and should be valued highly. There is a wealth of great art from Michelangelo to Brian Eno to Andy Goldsworthy that has value beyond most estimation. Please don’t confuse value in a cultural or aesthetic sense with monetary value, which is mostly what I’m talking about in this article – how to make a living from being a artist.

What I said was that as artists we shouldn’t presume monetary value, especially in our own work. This does not in anyway mean our work is not valuable, but to understand how a scheme such as the one I’m suggesting will ever work, you really need to see clearly that no matter how good an artist you are, your competition is the guy next to you who is just as good (or merely just populist), but is willing to give his work away for free. Do you get that? You might think that your latest magnum opus deserves to be a best seller and make you a million bucks, but if Dan Brown comes along with Da Vinci Code II and gives it a way for a penny a book, don’t pout and cry unfair. Just because you value your work doesn’t mean anyone else will.

Mario: The flaw in Flattr that I perceive comes about when I ask myself how I would use it.

I’ll just outline Flattr for anyone who doesn’t know how it works: Firstly, you set up a Flattr account. Then you determine in advance an amount of real cash to put in that account. As you surf around the web and see Flattr buttons on sites, you click them if you like what you see. At the end of the month, your account is divided by the number of clicks that you’ve made and then disbursed to those people whose buttons you clicked.

Now, as I’m sure you understand, Flattr interests me greatly, so I’m predisposed to like it. When I think about it I can actually foresee three problems. Firstly, Flattr is plainly not useful until it becomes ubiquitous (or at least very widespread).

For instance, if you and I were the only people in our circle to have Flattr, we would only have one another’s buttons to click. Let’s say I put $100 into my monthly Flattr account. Now I go to your blog and read something I like – am I going to click your Flattr button? Probably not – I don’t know anyone else with Flattr, and even though your article is good, I don’t think it’s worth a hundred bucks. I’m not sure how Flattr’s creators aim to attack this problem, but until they do, I predict no-one is going to use it.

My second problem comes with the concept of putting in money in advance. I just ask myself how I would approach that and it becomes too hard – should I put in $10? $12? $100? How do I know? All I know for certain is that no matter how much I put in, I will lose it all the first Flattr click I make. This is kind of daunting.

And a third problem is that I can’t reward someone whose material I like better than someone elses. For instance, If I really like what you said one month, I can’t tip you a little bit extra to show you that. Flattr’s reimbursement is equal across all the buttons you click (as I understand it, clicking more than once on a button has no extra effect – and anyway, even if it did, then you’d get into a complicated system of having to ‘count’ how many times you clicked on someone’s button, compared with how many times you clicked elsewhere – aaargh. A nightmare).

I propose that Flattr would work better if it was operating more along the lines of the ‘tip’ scenario as I outlined in my post.

And yes, the iTunes situation is close to what I think it should be, only far less than $1. I probably wouldn’t tip blog articles a dollar, but I’d certainly give them a few cents if I liked them. These things have to be put into perspective. I read hundreds and hundreds of blog post, news articles and other commentary over the course of a week – I simply couldn’t afford to pay them all a dollar. I believe that I’m right in thinking that many people would tip a few cents for things though.

Of course – the iTunes app store is an unqualified success. As I said, Apple was spot on in their assessment that people would pay an ‘appropriate’ amount for a song. And the actual mechanism is near flawless – you want a song, you click, it’s yours. That’s exactly how a micropayment system needs to work.

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